Hello I am İsa BADEM, an ELT teacher who’ve been teaching English, Turkish, Drama, Mental (Puzzle) Games and coding in primary level. I use and like not only technology but also integration of it to education. I used to hate computers because I couldn’t figure out how the mouse cursor on desktop screen moves easily in twisted and curled directions drawing casual lines in my first computer science lesson in high school. The only thing I knew was that I could go only in 4 directions since there were four arrow keys on keyboard. A lot of water has flowed beneath the bridge. Today we have professions that did not used to exist before 5 or 10 years. So I believe my primary aged students will be working in non-exist professions in the future. CS professions will be one of the bestsalary and fastest-growing sectors over the next century. Creativity, problem solving, computational and critical thinking which are the most needed professional future skills can be easily acquired by coding. I integrate, at least try to implement coding to my all lessons as far as I can do for 2 years. Last year I participated in an international eTwinning project “I MAKE MY FIRST APP” even without having smart board, tablet, projector, laptop or desktop in my classroom. I carried out the project through 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th grades. I mostly prefer making unplugged activities. I sometimes collaborate with private colleges and universities for EU CODEWEEK events. Pupils really like coding when they realize how inventive stuff they can create with it. Integrating coding activities to other subjects is really essential as well as teaching coding itself. These are some of my students’ reflections on coding, who joined various unplugged activities in different subject lessons.

Talha (8th Grade)

Coding integrated to English Subject

I love technology. I used to only play games with my tablets and desktop till I met coding when I was 7th grade. It was English lesson and the topic was -If Clause-. Teacher had drawn a line, a stickman at the beginning of the line, several barriers and coins in front of the stickman” We were asked to make very simple sentences using -If Clause like

– Stickman moves forward, if there is no barrier

– Stickman jumps, if there is a barrier

-Stickman collects if there is coin

At the end of the lesson we were assigned to complete the tasks of code.org Course 2, the stage 13 Bee Conditionals. After finishing the stage I realized that we in fact wrote a PLAYLAB for the “I MAKE MY FIRST APP” project. Nowadays I try to create my own game using Unity. It is quite out of the ordinary”

I learned coding last year in 4th grade. We were jogging for a sprint competition in PE lesson. Our English teacher Isa BADEM joined us and asked to make a different run race “The Relay Programming Run Race”. We divided into 4 groups. We were supposed: to dash over to the image one by one, review it, and write down the symbols in the program to reproduce the image across us to debug the program if needed to finish first to win The most favorite and challenging part was debugging. We played this several times, with images of increasing difficulty.

We have 2 hours Mental (Puzzle) Subject lessons every week and each week we learn new puzzles, problems and different kinds of board games. I took part in a very unusual 2015 December EU Codeweek workshop organized by Robert College which invited Mr Badem with his curious coders including me. Maze puzzle is one of my favorites. We met a new toy called Sphero which is navigated remotely. We wrote programs with drag & drop blocks using Sphero app to get out of the maze. It was amazing. We debugged by sometimes by removing sometimes by adding blocks to move the Sphero ball through the maze corridors.

Elif & Duygu (5th Grade)

Coding Integrated To Free Time Activity Lesson

Last year in 4th grade we did coding activities in free time activity lessons. Some of them were Graph Paper Programming, Real- Life Algorithm, If Else Sentences and Binary System. The most we loved was making Binary Jewelry. We wrote our names in binary system using beads and we did a mini Binary Jewelry Creation Show. We posed for cameras as a model wearing our binary jewelry. We had so much fun.

It is clear that coding practice develop pupil’s critical problem solving skills. They enthusiastically insist on looking for the solutions to debug whereas they easily give up while solving a math problem.

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What happens if you lock 50 percent of a society’s population at home? During the Taliban regime, women had almost zero percent participation in social activities, education and in the workforce. Women were not allowed to leave home without a male companion. I was born as an Afghan refugee in Iran during the USSR invasion to Afghanistan. One year after the fall of Taliban, my family and I moved to Afghanistan. I got my Bachelors degree in Computer Science from Herat University and Master’s degree from Technical University of Berlin in Germany.

Looking back to Afghanistan during the Taliban regime in 2001, there were only fewer than a million students in Afghanistan with almost zero percent of girls. Currently there are more than 8.3 million students across Afghanistan which 40 percent of them are girls .

Considering Afghanistan as a country with an old history, there are still cultural, traditional and social issues which prevent women to communicate and grow within the community. I was teaching as a professor in Herat Computer Science faculty for couple of years. To be a female professor, student or entrepreneur in Computer Science field for an Afghan woman has its own unique challenges and obstacles considering it as a global matter for women around the world as well.

Imagine you are a female student graduating having studied Computer Science in Afghanistan, you are ready to join the workforce and apply what you have learned, although there are some major factors which makes it very difficult to pursue what you want.

• Safety and security barriers: despite the positive signs of improvement in Afghanistan, still it has been suffering from ongoing conflict and war zones in certain areas that limit women traveling by ground. Majority of families prefer that women travel by plane. Although it is the safest and fastest option it’s also costly and not a lot of family can afford to purchase the tickets. If a woman finds a job offer outside of her hometown, not a lot of families let their daughters travel and live alone in another another city considering the security issue.

• Social and Cultural concerns: many families are cautious about their daughter’s job employment. many of them prefer their daughter to become a teacher, because it is a well respected job in the society and you are getting paid and only deal with women. Therefore, many for graduating students from computer science may become a teachers and won’t be able to use the knowledge they have learned at school in the way they want.

• Women entrepreneurs and tech start ups: If you are an woman in Afghanistan and established your tech startup, considering the male dominated market(which is a global issue too), there is a considerable social issue that you have to deal with it. Based on my personal experience when you are approaching customers who are mainly men and explain how you can help them with your tech skills, either by designing website, developing Information Management Systems or any thing they are looking for, most of the time they don’t believe in a women’s skills or abilities. They respond, “We don’t think women can do that!”

The above reasons and many others helped me to establish Code to Inspire, a 501(c)3 nonprofit in January, 2015. CTI’s mission is to educate, inspire and empower women in Afghanistan by teaching them how to code and by improving their technical literacy so they can find future internships and jobs opportunities online.

We established the first coding school for girls in Afghanistan in November 2015 at Herat which is located in Western part of Afghanistan. It is a safe and secure educational environment where we host 50 girls from high school daily. All the girls studied computer science. CTI provides a one year educational curriculum for girls which is free of charge. We are teaching students from high school how to design websites, code in HTML, CSS and Javascript, and how to use social media(e.g. Twitter and Linkedin) to engage a larger audience and make a professional profile. Once we involve high school girls in the tech world, we encourage them to select computer science as their major when they are entering college to decrease the gender gap.

Our targets are girls who are currently studying computer science or girls who have recently graduated.With the computer science students, we are developing mobile applications. The students will find a real issue in society and try to develop an App solution for that, with a real use case. Not only will they learn teamwork and how to make a product from scratch to the final stage but there are will be social impact issues as well. Imagine the guy who didn’t believe in women’s technical skills, all of a sudden using an App that was developed and designed by women and is actually is solving an issue. When he starts using app, his act will be empowering women too. One of the most important challenges that we are going to tackle with CTI, is to find internships and job opportunities for our female students online and to help them earn an income. Thanks to recent technological achievements, the only thing you need to connect to the whole world faster, easier, without geographical/physical boundary is a computer and Internet connection.

The students can use CTI’s facility and do their jobs online, therefore, the families will not be worried about traveling and their daughter’s safety.

I strongly believe that education is the key for women empowerment which includes financial inclusion of women in a country’s economy. More educated women leads to less domestic violence, a decrease in early marriages and less of a maternal mortality rate.

Educated mothers, make the next generation more willing to learn and and this will make more peace and less war.

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There are many technologies that have been created aiming to assist students in the development of computational thinking skills, such as Logo [1], Alice [2] and, especially, Scratch [3], which has become the standard programming language to teach computing in schools. However there is a lack of tools that support both teachers and learners in the assessment of this competence.

Dr. Scratch is a free/libre/open source web tool that analyses Scratch projects to offer feedback to educators and learners by assigning a computational thinking score to the projects. This computational thinking score, which ranges from 0 to 21 points, is based on the degree of development of different dimensions of the computational thinking competence, specifically abstraction and problem decomposition, logical thinking, synchronization, parallelism, algorithmic notions of flow control, user interactivity and data representation, which are evaluated by inspecting the source code of the analysed project [4]. Dr. Scratch also detects certain bad habits of programming or potential errors that are commonly found in the projects of the Scratch repository [5, 6], such as non-significant sprite names, repetition of code, code that is never executed and the incorrect initialization of object attributes, as shown in Figure 1.

For each of the bad programming habits detected in the code and for each of the computational thinking dimensions where there is room for improvement, the tool provides links to information that can be used to improve the projects. For example, if a project includes repeated code, Dr. Scratch provides a link to sample source code and an explanation of why this situation should be avoided and how users could improve their project by developing their own blocks (see Figure 2).

Aiming not to overwhelm novice programmers, the feedback report provided by Dr. Scratch in the results page depends on the computational thinking score. Thus, if the score is low the tool will only show basic information of the most important improvements to perform in the code. As the score increases, Dr. Scratch will provide more information of the analysed projects.

By offering a partially gamified interface [7], with scores and levels, Dr. Scratch tries to encourage learners to improve their programming skills. In a previous investigation [8], over 100 learners in the range from 10 to 14 years participated in a series of workshops where they tried to improve their Scratch projects using the advice offered by the tool. The results show that participating students increased their score and, in consequence, enhanced their computational thinking skills.

Dr. Scratch is being used by teachers and organizations from all over the world as a support tool in the evaluation tasks [9]. For instance, the tool can be used to detect students that do not use certain instructions in their projects, such as logic operations or clones, so teachers can prepare specific tasks to help them understand their importance.

“Basically, I really like the opportunity to give the students a totally subjective (and external to their teacher) perspective on their coding and where it does and doesn’t quite match up. I also appreciate the reduction in my time in analysis and marking, including trying to find where their code might be in error if it is not doing what it should.

I normally still need to mark to see if they have met the criteria I have set, but Dr. Scratch is a huge help still!”

Paul Herring, St Peters Lutheran College, Australia.

“Students often believe that if their project “works”, then their project cannot get any better. I use Dr. Scratch to show weaknesses in the code that can be improved bringing in the foreground all the computer science concepts students are learning actively but silently. Dr. Scratch helps my students to improve their coding skills in a way that can be transferred to professional programming languages. I often get feedback from my students that when they use Dr. Scratch their work seems more relevant to the computer course and that it enhances their feeling of achievement.”

Dimitris Nikolos, Model Experimental Junior High School of University of Patras, Greece.

There are some shortcomings that we plan to address in the near future. So, the analysis of a single project by a learner does not provide a complete picture of his/her computational thinking development. The reason is that there are wonderful simple projects that do not require to be modified in order to include more complex structures (those that give a higher computational thinking score). In the near future the development team of Dr. Scratch will include a new feature to allow the creation of user accounts. In consequence, the analysis of the portfolio of projects of the users will provide a richer picture, as the aggregate scores will allow detecting gaps of knowledge more accurately.

It is worth mentioning that although Dr. Scratch is successfully supporting teachers in the assessment tasks, the tool should not be understood as a replacement of evaluators or mentors, as there are key computational thinking skills, such as debugging, that are not evaluated. Moreover, functionality, originality or creativity, key aspects of programming projects, are not either taken into account in the score provided by Dr. Scratch.

Acknowledgments

The work of both authors has been funded in part by the Region of Madrid under project “eMadrid – Investigación y Desarrollo de tecnologías para el e-learning en la Comunidad de Madrid” (S2013/ICE-2715). The work of Gregorio Robles has been funded in part by the Spanish Government under project SobreSale (TIN2011- 28110). We would like to thank as well Eva Hu and Mari Luz Aguado for their technical support with Dr.Scratch. References

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On Saturday 10th of October we had the Festival of Learning with Technology at the WOW Zone in Wythenshawe, Manchester. There were over 100 participants of all ages, with many different interests. This event aimed to give an opportunity to parents and children to have fun with technology together.

We always talk about how stereotyping in science impacts on children’s future decision when selecting subjects to study, both at secondary school level and degree level. What we forget is that parents have a strong impact on children’s decisions when it comes to selecting which subjects to study. If they do not understand the subjects, what children learn by studying them and how this would impact on their learning in general, how would they even encourage their children to try it out.

We would like:

• More children to select to study science related subjects

• More girls to be involved in technology related subjects, activities and jobs • More children from disadvantaged backgrounds to get an opportunity to take part in technology and science related activities.

Therefore we need to reach the parents. Without their help we cannot support children. For example we can teach children how to code at school, but if they are discouraged when they go home, because of their parents lack of understanding how coding helps children to develop valuable problem solving and critical thinking skills, they might stop children from coding at home.

On the day it was amazing to see young kids talking about their experiences of coding activities. It was also fascinating to watch grandparents coding with their grand children. There was a moment when a father screamed with joy when he managed to complete game before his son. There was another moment when a lovely girl managed to turn her picture in to life using Arduino.(https://twitter.com/ yallsop/status/652793034267082752).

Another moment, when a couple of young kids decided to do the Minecraft workshop again and again! There was no way of separating them from Minecraft!

These moments are very precious for us because these are the moments that will help more children become involved in coding and digital making! These are the moments that will help parents to develop an understanding of why we focus on computer science in schools and what they could do to help their children.

We will continue to run events just for families to learn and share together!

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by Brent Hughes, Primary school teacher, Matific Teacher Educator, Full time Maths Nerd

I love teaching, I love everything about it. Impacting the lives of children gave me a true sense of pride that I didn’t perceive any career would ever be able to match. My name is Brent Hughes and I am a 26-year-old primary school teacher that after only three-and-a-half short years of classroom teaching has already moved on to another career. Why did I move on so quickly? It is a fair question and one that I myself battled with for a while. The short answer is “numbers”. I calculated that working in a classroom for 40 years with an average of 30 children in my class each year I would impact the lives of 1200 children. I now work as a teacher educator and presenter for an amazing company called Matific. I travel around Australia and New Zealand working with teachers and with schools on how to make the most of classroom technology and how to ensure that their children are both educationally engaged and enjoying maths. In four months of working for Matific I have already impacted the mathematical lives of more children that I would have in a career of classroom teaching. This knowledge allows me to still achieve that drive, that sense of pride knowing that I am still making a difference.

Matific is the brainchild of a few educators who are far more intelligent than I. With the amount of children disengaging in maths at an early age growing rapidly; coupled with a huge gaping hole in the market for quality online Mathematical teaching tools, Matific was born.

Matific is a product that is truly like nothing else.

In short it is a K-6 online maths teaching tool. There are a lot of products out there that are also online maths resources and they too claim to be “engaging” and “beneficial”. However, for the children in my class, none of them came close to being as engaging for my students or as beneficial for my teaching. Matific encourages a deep understanding of mathematical concepts where the children are learning through inquiry. Something that I say to teachers consistently is: “Matific creates opportunities for you as the teacher to take your class towards a deeper understanding”. These opportunities are absolute gold in the classroom and with Matific I was just amazed at how often they were arising for my class. The following are actual quotes from children I have worked with:

The thing that makes Matific so successful is a combination of two very important elements. The first being that the content is designed by educators. This is very apparent to me as a teacher when you look at Matific “gamified” content. You can clearly see the strong mathematical focus for each activity. In a lot of other programs finding the “maths” within a game can be really challenging. This just means when a child is engaging with that product they aren’t really learning anything. The second factor that makes Matific an amazing product is the pedagogical base that everything on there is underpinned by.

Matific promotes deep understanding through the children discovering concepts themselves. Something that we can all thank Mr Piaget for. Matific is now in over 30 Countries and 16 Languages. Hundreds of thousands of people across the world have begun to implement Matific into their classroom practice a few times a week and they are beginning to reap the benefits of the heightened engagement. Matific offers so much more than what I have discussed here. Things like instant reporting, differentiated tasks across the grade, homework activities, teacher lesson plans etc.

To check out everything log on to www.matific.com.au or send me an email brent@matific.com

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About the author: Kelly Brooke is 26 years old and has a master’s degree in Mass Communication. She is currently employed by Univariety. She studied at St. Francis College for Women, Hyderabad, India. She enjoys writing about just about anything, and finds coming transformation of education and admissions process fascinating. https://www.univariety.com

Today, like every day, more than 40,000 children were born in India. In a few years, these 40,000 babies will grow up into children and will be ready to enroll in schools. But how many of these kids actually get the chance to get educated? We all know well that India’s education system is fighting a losing battle. With no hopes of better infrastructure and trained teachers in stark contrast with the rising number of students, there can be no expectation of bringing about an improvement. The matter becomes further hopeless when we consider how under-funded the educational sector has become.

When all hope seemed lost, there came a revolution which literally shook our planet. The advent of the internet and its rapid rise effectively removed international boundaries across the globe, turning it into a single global village. The advent of internet brought new possibilities and opportunities which can help in solving the problems faced by the education sectors of all developing nations. Inadequate infrastructure, lack of trained teachers and the inability to spread education among all sections of the society: all these problems can be solved with the utilization of internet as a source of e-learning.

Although e-learning, as a concept, has been around for quite a while, it has seen strong surges recently, especially in India where the prices of devices like computers and mobiles have fallen considerably. This has increased the number of internet users across the country and also resulted in higher internet/digital literacy. According to a report (India E-Learning Market Outlook to FY2018), the Indian e-market is poised to grow at 17.4 CAGR (compound annual growth rate) between the financial years 2013 and 2018. The number of internet users in India is also on a rapid rise as they are already leaving US behind and are only second to China. It was also found that Indians are the most aggressive users of online courses. Among the 29 lakh registered users of Coursera (a leading e-learning portal), nearly 2.5 lakh users are Indian, which makes it a staggering 8 percent of the overall users.

Many institutes in India have already started to tap into the potential of e-learning. Professor S Sadagopan, director IIT Bangalore says, “Technology is transforming all 4 L”s of learning- lectures through LMS (Learning Management Sytems), MOOC (Massively Open Online Coursewares), libraries through e-books and e-journals, laboratories through MIT iLab like initiatives and life through social media blogs, tweets, Whatsapp and Facebook.”

E-learning can enable students to learn through live classes from expert instructors even if they are geographically apart. It also offers the opportunity to self-learn in an easy and less costly way as the only resource required is a device connected to the World Wide Web.

India has a population of 1.21 billion. Nearly half of the population consists of people who can be the potential target audience of e-learning. The conventional schooling methods are becoming more difficult and costly with every passing day as the population continues to rise. E-learning remains the best option that offers students with a customized and personalized opportunity to learn.

The World Wide Web is like an ocean filled with pearls. The deeper you dive, the more you get.

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Dale Coan Currently a specialist teacher of computing covering all years groups from Y1 to Y6 at Hexthorpe Primary School, Doncaster, South Yorkshire. I have been a specialist teacher of primary computing for 10 years and have also been a schools curriculum ICT technician for 10 years so I have seen both sides of the fence, but can’t say which side of the fence the grass is greener! I have also had other roles outside of education in engineering, software support and development as well as systems and network management/installation etc. so you could say a wide and varied career.”

Driving test using Scratch

Small challenge looking at sensing, but rather than expecting the children to pluck a solution out of the air, I have provided ‘a solution’ in the form of the required blocks to act as a scaffold. Now they have to concentrate on working out how it works together rather than having the added task of working out what blocks they need in the first place. That part is left as an extension for them to provide their own solution.

Playing with Alice! by Dale Coan

Here is my attempt at creating a kind of ‘walk through’ tutorial you could give out. Would require some previous basic experience of using Alice 2.4 but the methods are quite simple and screenshots are provided with each step. I have show how to animate a character and demonstrated how to link that to and event driven scenario i.e. Zombie (everyone likes a zombie game!) walks forward and turns when the relevant arrow keys are pressed, The example Alice world also includes sounds and a puddle that causes the Zombie to growl if he steps in it. This events driven style forms the basis for all games and could be used as a starting point for pupils to think about creating their own game. The hardest point is actually manipulating the characters legs to rotate in the correct way, something Alice leaves a lot to be desired for. Would probably use this with HA Y5/6.